Einstein: religion is “childish superstition”

November 2, 2009 by Tim
Filed under: Heroes, Religion

Few other historic figures have had their religious beliefs as thoroughly questioned as that of Albert Einstein. I suppose the problem is that he often used the word “God” in his conversations and writings. Of course, atheists would like to claim him as one but he consistently rebuffed this claim since he considered himself an agnostic. He did though reject the notion of a personal, interventionist god. So at most he was a deist agnostic. But even then, he emphatically pronounced that the god he talked of was “Spinoza’s God“, which broadly translates to god = nature.

The religious claims on Einstein is however a curious phenomenon. Why is it that the religious always seems to want the authority of scientists to effectively disprove science? People who believe in an entirely invisible realm without one iota of evidence ever have being produced – a concept in complete antipathy to science – somehow need a scientist to validate their fantasies. And the more famous the scientist, the better. Hence the continuous claims on Einstein as a believer in “god”.

A year before his death in 1955, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to philosopher Erik Gutkind after reading his book, ‘Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt’. If anyone is still undecided whether Einstein believed in a god, I would suggest this passage from the letter will clear up the matter:

The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. … For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstition. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong … have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything “chosen” about them.

Until his dying day, Einstein was in awe of nature, the universe. And like all people who know so much about it, he understood how little we know. This was his mystery, his “god”. As Walter Isaacson says in his book Einstein: His Life and Universe,

For some people, miracles serve as evidence of God’s existence. For Einstein it was the absence of miracles that reflected divine providence. The fact that the world was comprehensible, that it followed laws, was worthy of awe.